Slow Motion Testing

Before I went into the kitchen to film my slow motion scenes, I decided to do a quick test at home in order to check the quality of the 720p footage was good enough for me to use. Sadly due to equipment limitations, filming in anything past 25/30 frames per second meant that I would have to shoot in 720p, a step below the 1080p I was hoping to achieve. Fortunately I was able to use a feature on my camera through Magic Lantern that allowed me to access the control of the default bitrate.

Magic Lantern is a third party firmware revision for Canon cameras that is able to unlock a huge amount of features that are not normally available in my camera. Using this software to increase the bitrate should give me much cleaner footage at 720p, with less compression artefacts present it should scale much more cleanly. The only problem with doing this is that if the CPU buffer hits its limit, the camera uses a reset function to stop movie recording automatically, meaning the camera has to be restarted in order to continue filming. Fortunately after doing some research I came across the following table on the Magic Lantern wikia:

This chart shows the maximum bit rate setting for each card tested with cameras that have the same sensor and CPU as mine. Quite conveniently my 2 cards (top and third) have the same bit rate multiplier for sound enabled recording, meaning I don't have to switch between the 2 settings when I change cards. With my bit rate multiplier set at 1.4x I filmed the following short clip on 720p 60fps of me making a (horrible) cup of coffee:

I think the quality came out pretty well despite YouTube's compression of the original file (looks much better on the original file). This test confirmed that for the purposes of this project the quality will be more than good enough, meaning I can continue filming without having to worry about hiring in any more equipment.